Great figures who went through “Feeling alone”

Figures who went through this

• Hitomi Kinue — Aloof? I Never Could Be

  "When I lose, what kind of face will the people of Japan have when they look at me?" At nineteen, setting out alone for Sweden, that was what frightened her most. The story of the first Japanese woman to win an Olympic medal, who could never stay aloof.

• Makino Tomitaro — The Man Who Spared Nothing

  "One who begrudges money cannot be a plant scientist." So wrote the only son of a sake shop when he was about twenty. He poured the family fortune into plants, and wrote about plants at a desk while court officers seized the furniture beside him. What held that life together was his wife, who joked that she was raising a spoiled son who wasted money on his hobby.

• Miyamoto Musashi — The Master Who Never Met His Time

  "I did not win because I had mastered the art of fighting." The man who never lost wrote this at sixty. He never served any lord, was laughed at by a child for being a coward, and failed at a painting in front of his lord. The proud, bluffing life of a swordsman.

• Murasaki Shikibu — The Woman Who Wouldn't Write Even "One"

  "I do not even write the character for 'one.'" The woman who wrote that also wrote a very long story. Her father sighed over her, the court gossiped about her, and in the end she put everything she had hidden into one letter and asked: "When you have read it, please send it right back." This is her story.

• Nakahara Chuya — The Man He Could Not Hate

  On the day his girlfriend left, he carried her breakable things to the house of the man she was moving in with. He wrote of that man as "my enemy." Twelve years later, he trusted him with his last book of poems. The bitter, hard-to-hate life of a poet who died at thirty.

• Takamura Chieko — The Woman Who Could Not Show Her Work

  "There is no sky in Tokyo," she sighed. As a young woman she would hardly bring her paintings even to the man who would become her husband, and after one rejection she stopped entering exhibitions. On her last day, that same woman put into her husband's hands the paper pictures she had gathered together herself.